Tag Archives: Backup Cameras

A few weeks ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), after much delay, passed a law requiring backup cameras in cars. It will, first and foremost, improve safety, particularly for the small children who cannot be seen without them and are the victims of thousands of backup accidents annually. Backup cameras have proven very effective in studies, beating out parking sensors and other machine vision methods in effectively preventing crashes.

Photo: NHTSA

We want to know what this all means for car manufacturers and, of course, camera manufacturers (our customers) who will soon be producing and assembling cameras to meet a growing demand as they ramp up to May of 2018, when all new cars will be required to have them.

The main challenge we see is that the obligatory 10 by 20 foot visible zone definitely requires a wide angle or fish eye camera module. Therefore, these automotive backup cameras must certainly be assembled using active alignment so that the outside edges of the resulting image are in focus. Otherwise, the safety measure will be compromised.

The good news for us is that we will be working hard on our products – Pixid Systems – so that they will produce the best backup cameras possible, with no fuzzy imaging areas around the edges. We can see now that backup cameras are here to stay; we know that our company is contributing to automotive safety through our work to create rearview cameras with optimized clarity. We hope that more innovation in the automotive world, including the head-up displays that project information onto the windshield, will improve driving safety even further.

One of the individuals filing the lawsuit is Greg Gulbransen, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to bring attention to his passion for the cause. When he tragically hit his two year old, fatally, in 2002, he began to campaign for change. In 2007, the new law requiring backup cameras was named for his son Cameron.

Cameras placed at the rear of the car have been found to be the most effective way to alert drivers of people in their back-up path. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a report in 2006 entitled “Vehicle Backover Avoidance Technology Study.” The report concluded from its testing that ultrasonic and radar sensor technology is ineffective for this purpose and that vision-based cameras had the greatest potential for success because “the rearview camera systems typically provided drivers with the ability to see pedestrians in the majority of the rear blind zone areas.”

Kasalis believes that there is indeed great potential in rearview video systems to prevent backover accidents. In the hope that Congress revisits this legislation sometime in 2012, and rearview cameras become standard, we look forward to working with automotive cameras a great deal in the near future.